Intro
As a reminder, my structure from the Module 3 assignment is meant to be a wave-shaped shelter that can cover a walkway, sidewalk, or bridge. It can be flexed and resized in many ways (see video).
Part 1
For Part 1, I simplified my structure from the previous assignment (from multiple surfaces to one surface) and sought out a relatively simple painting that would still look good after being pixelated. The image I found was someone’s painting of a sunset behind some a mountain range - I figured that the simple color scheme would translate well, and it did.
Part 2
After imposing the painting, I wanted to practice the embossing technique. With some help from Donatien’s submission, I was able to emboss based upon brightness, as I wanted the mountains to stick out according to their darkness, since the closest mountains are darker and they fade to lighter shades of grey as they get farther away. The result was a little messy but still captures the gist. In this step, I had some failed attempts at sorting the RGB values of a list - being able to do so would probably have allowed me to bucket the colors better for cleaner levels of embossment.
Part 3
In Part 3, I removed the painting and curved my shelter a bit to have a more pronounced effect from following the sun. I followed the same steps shown in the Grasshopper videos on Canvas, allowing my shelter panels to change both color and aperture size according to direct sun exposure. A video of this in action shows how the panels change from sunrise to sundown. In my script I did make one key adjustment to the method shown in the Canvas videos - on Canvas, the apertures opened wider when directly facing the sun (this could be desired in certain circumstances). However, I decided to switch this effect, assuming that our shelter would want to provide shade to its users. To do so, I made sure the list of dot products (of each panel’s normal vector and the vector from the origin to the sun) was normalized from 0 to 1, and then I took the 1-x value so that the low values (e.g. 0.1) became higher (0.9) and vice versa. [the normalization was made easy with a “list normalizer” plugin from Heteroptera].
Next Steps
Some additional goals I had but did not accomplish include:
- Mirror the wave so that it could provide a two-sided shelter (especially for bridges), and allow this two-part structure to flex in all the same ways as the one-part wave structure.
- Try modeling the sun to a more accurate scale; this would probably not fit onto the program’s canvas given the distance of the sun, but I was curious to do the math and try it.
- Find a way to adjust the sun path for different seasons of the year (sounds like this might be forthcoming).
These assignments are quite fun and challenging and are proving to spark a Pandora’s Box of ideas in terms of what might be possible.